Fastly offers everything you need from a modern CDN, from effortless scale and built-in security to programmable control and full visibility.
Resilient
Engineered for absolute uptime
Most legacy CDNs route the internet through centralized control planes, so one bad config push can take the entire network down at once. Fastly is built differently - a modern, decentralized edge architecture prevents total system failures, constraints localized bugs, and automatically routes around fiber cuts, traffic surges and infrastructure outages.
Trusted by
Resilience at every layer, not bolted on after
Traditional CDNs create a single point of failure by design. See how each layer of the Fastly platform removes one.
Config deployment
Legacy CDNs push config globally, where a single typo can trigger a global outage. Fastly rolls out progressively with instant rollback.
Code execution
Routing decisions
Centralized DNS and control-plane routing fail together. Fastly POPs route autonomously and self-heal locally.
Origin protection
Basic queuing is easily overwhelmed during an outage. Media Shield and Origin Shield clustering minimize load on your origin.
No central brain to lose
Fastly decentralizes routing to globally distributed POPs instead of relying on a risky central control point. An outage in one region stays in that region, leaving the rest of the network completely unaffected.
Local autonomy
Every Fastly Point of Presence operates independently, making its own routing decisions in real time.
Control plane isolation
Edge nodes serve traffic without a continuous connection to a centralized control plane.
Blast radius reduction
A failure in one region or control component stays local instead of cascading across the network.
One bad deploy should not take down a platform
Fastly Compute moves application logic off fragile central origins and onto the global edge, executing code in secure, isolated environments with startup times under 50 microseconds. Bugs stay confined to the thread that created them.
Sandboxed execution
High-performance WebAssembly runtimes isolate customer code and configuration deployments.
Granular process control
Bugs, infinite loops, and memory leaks are strictly confined to a single execution thread.
Instant containment
A faulting process is terminated and restarted instantly, with no impact on neighboring applications or the POP.
Degrade gracefully, recover automatically
When something upstream breaks, the answer should not be an error page. Fastly keeps systems running in a reduced state rather than failing outright, and uses AI and ML to monitor health and automate the response.
Static fallbacks
When origin servers or microservices fail, edge nodes serve stale cached content or fallback pages so the experience stays intact.
Automated traffic routing
Real-time visibility from user to origin shifts traffic away from degraded components without human intervention.
Predictive scaling
The platform absorbs sudden spikes, from flash sales to breaking news, with no manual intervention required.
Redundancy the internet cannot route around
Resilience fails when everything shares a dependency. Fastly deliberately varies its transit, its hardware, and its release cadence so no single provider, component, or deploy can take the fleet down.
Multi-transit backbone
Dozens of global transit networks and hundreds of internet exchange points, never a single provider.
Heterogeneous hardware
Diverse hardware profiles and multi-vendor components mitigate supply chain and firmware-level risk.
Asynchronous deployments
Software and config changes roll out progressively across the fleet and across regions, never all at once.
What resilience is worth to the business
Uptime is an engineering outcome with a commercial return. Here is where it shows up.
Protect brand reputation
Maintain continuous service delivery through regional infrastructure failures and targeted DDoS attacks.
Accelerate developer velocity
Deploy at the edge with confidence, knowing built-in isolation stops a config error from taking down your app.
Optimize operational cost
Drop the overhead of running a complex multi-CDN architecture just to get basic redundancy.
Build security in
Fastly Next-Gen WAF acts as a layer of edge resiliency, blocking threats before they reach your origin.
Resilience, by the numbers
Architectural resilience backed by network capacity and an industry-leading SLA. Fastly is named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Edge Delivery Services 2023 Vendor Assessment.
Go deeper on resilience
Blog SeriesFastly's Pillars of Resilience
The multi-part engineering series on distributed decision-making, fault isolation, and graceful degradation.
ProductFastly Compute
Run application logic at the edge in isolated environments with startup times under 50 microseconds.
Frequently asked questions
What makes Fastly's CDN reliability different from a traditional CDN?
Most legacy CDNs route the internet through centralized control planes, so one bad config push can take the whole network down at once. Fastly is built the opposite way — a decentralized edge architecture that prevents total system failures, contains localized bugs, and automatically routes around fiber cuts, traffic surges, and infrastructure outages.
How does Fastly prevent a single bad config deployment from causing a global outage?
Legacy CDNs push configuration globally, so a single typo can trigger a global outage. Fastly rolls out configuration changes progressively, with instant rollback, so a bad deployment is caught and reversed before it can spread across the fleet.
How does Fastly stop one customer's buggy code from affecting other applications?
Fastly sandboxes every request thread in isolated WebAssembly. Because shared process space carries a high risk of cascading failure, this isolation means bugs, infinite loops, and memory leaks stay confined to the single execution thread that created them. A faulty process is terminated and restarted instantly with no impact on neighboring applications or the POP.
What happens if one region or data center goes down?
Fastly decentralizes routing to globally distributed Points of Presence (POPs) instead of relying on a centralized control point. Every POP operates independently, making its own routing decisions in real time. An outage in one region stays in that region, leaving the rest of the network unaffected.
Does Fastly rely on centralized DNS or routing that could fail all at once?
No. Centralized DNS and control-plane routing fail together by design. Fastly POPs instead route autonomously and self-heal locally, without a continuous dependency on a centralized control plane.
Build on a network that stays up
See how Fastly's distributed architecture keeps your applications online through the outages, surges, and attacks that take other networks down.